Great Basin National Park

What an unexpected pleasure!
We decided to stop here on our way from Denver to Yosemite. Located on the Utah/Nevada border. We arrived at 1:30pm, and with only one day planned we had to make some decisions. Having already been to Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky we skipped Lehman caves and took the Wheeler Peak scenic drive- a very winedy drive to the top.

We then took the Bristlecone/Glacier Trail since this is what is really unique about this park. The 1.5 mile hike to the Bristlecone pines end up at about 10500 ft. was well worth the time and a bit of altitude light headed-ness. Good thing to have water and take breaks to catch your breath. Unique in shape and stature these trees are 3000 and 4000 years old and still alive.

This is a great park if you don't like crowds- unlike the more 'popular' parks like Yosemite and Grand Canyon, that have millions of visitors, we were told that this one gets about 300,000. Nice! There is a campground and I wished we had known what a nice gem this park was we would have camped here. But we had a deadline to be at Yosemite for our reserved camping and needed to move on.

There isn't much around here. The closest town is Ely about 1 hour away. Here we splurged on McDonald's and filled up the tank with gas for our 4+ hour drive to Tonapah,NV.